"It is noteworthy, though perhaps not surprising, that in every case, Stevens wants an amendment that will overturn what he sees as a wrongheaded decision by the Supreme Court. In each of these cases, Stevens was a dissenter. It is also noteworthy that Stevens’s broadest theme is the importance of democratic rule. His general goal is to promote self-government, which, as he sees it, has been badly compromised by recent Supreme Court rulings."

"This biography of Darcus Howe is undoubtedly a labour of love. Robin Bunce and Paul Field have made a creditable attempt to chart postwar black activism through one man’s life. And there can be no other person more appropriate to build the story around – because Darcus Howe is one of the standout activists and public intellectuals of his generation."

"Risen argues persuasively that those most responsible for the bill’s passage are given short shrift. ... The unsung heroes on which Risen focuses instead are Hubert Humphrey, the liberal Democratic Senator from Minnesota, who worked tirelessly to ensure the bill’s passage; the Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, who helped secure crucial Republican votes for the bill in the Senate (the Democrats knew that opposition to the bill would be the strongest from the Southern wing of their own party, making passage impossible without significant Republican support); conservative pro-civil-rights House Republicans, such as Ohio’s William McCulloch, and liberal Northeastern Republicans such as New York’s John Lindsay; and mainstream, establishment civil rights activists such as Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP and J. Irwin Miller of the National Council of Churches, who prodded, pressured, and persuaded members of Congress and the administration to support the bill."

"One of the ironies of the history of democracy is that its label has spread even as its meaning has become uncertain. As recently as the nineteenth century, countries we now call bourgeois democracies—the United States and the United Kingdom—had serious debates about whether democracy was desirable or feasible. Today, if asked to name the best type of government, an overwhelming majority of Americans would say, unsurprisingly, “democracy.” But so would the leaders of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Everyone now carries a torch for the democratic myth."

"“Inferno” ranges widely to offer a fascinating “anatomy of American punishment,” drawing on such diverse sources as Kant, Ursula K. Le Guin and Jack Henry Abbott, among many others. (In one of Le Guin’s stories, Ferguson writes, a utopian society “depends for its happiness on one innocent desperate child imprisoned in horribly cramped, filthy conditions at the center of its city.”) Ferguson surmises that people have a drive to punish, that we are generally unable to understand the pain and suffering of others, and that America’s traditions support an especially virulent “logic of severity.”"